In many areas of the world the World Wide Web (WWW), or Internet, has become a significant medium for the exchange of information including everything from casual electronic mail (e-mail) to legal and business documents to entertainment media. Much of the material exchanged over the Internet comprises very large electronic files, for example large documents, music, video and even full-length motion pictures are available for exchange and distribution over the Internet.
While commercial services often choose fast but expensive high-speed Internet connections for business purposes, typical consumer connections comprise relatively slow telephone modems. For example, a typical commercial T1 connection will yield in the range of 1,544 kilobits per second (Kbps) or 1.544 megabits per second (Mbps) data communications rate at a monthly cost in the range of $1,000 to $2,000. In contrast, a typical consumer telephone modem connection will provide a 56 Kbps data communications rate at a cost of in the range of $10–$30 month.
As commercial services provide richer content for consumer use, data file sizes increase. For example, a typical audio music file may be in the range of 3–5 Megabytes and take up to 10 minutes for a consumer to download over a telephone modem. A typical audio/video file, for example a full-length movie, may run in the thousands of mega bytes size range and take a significant part of a day for a consumer to download over a modem. Streaming audio or video may require the download of large quantities of data over an extended period of time.
It is obvious that the ability of commercial services to provide rich, large media files is rapidly outstripping the typical consumer's ability to receive those files.
Recently, several affordable, high-speed alternatives have become available to the traditional consumer telephone modem. Cable modems use the cable television infrastructure to provide Internet connections having a speed of about 1,100 Kbps, about 20× times the speed of a telephone modem. DSL modems use conventional telephone lines to provide Interconnect connections, and have an average speed of about 700 Kbps, or over 12× times the speed of a telephone modem. Both cable and DSL modems are priced at approximately twice the cost of telephone modem services, with slightly higher equipment costs than for standard modems.
The higher speed cable and DSL connections are geographically limited, however, by the underlying infrastructure. Many areas of the United States and worldwide include regions not serviced by cable television or where the cable television networks have not and will not be upgraded to support high-speed data modems. Similarly, DSL service is not available in many geographic areas. Numerous reasons exist for the limited availability of cable and DSL services, including high cost of infrastructure upgrade, technological limitations, physical geographical limitations and, in some areas, low demand. As with many types of commercial services, the incremental costs of extending infrastructure are becoming increasingly higher, sometimes by multiples or even exponentially, as attempts are made to expand those infrastructures to every last consumer.
There thus exists a real demand for high-speed Internet connections in areas that cable and/or DSL service providers may never serve. This demand will increase as more content is provided and more business is executed over the Internet.
Some providers have attempted to expand service coverage while avoiding the high costs associated with expanding network infrastructure. This is typically accomplished using a wireless network, for example extending from an access point in the wired infrastructure. Wireless networks may be installed without the need for the wired infrastructure.
One type of wireless network uses wireless radio frequency (RF) components that transmit data in the radio frequency spectrum. These networks, however, have the disadvantages of being expensive and relatively slow. In one embodiment of multi-channel multipoint distribution system (MMDS), for example, broadcasts occur at speeds up to 25 Mbps but require very expensive spread-spectrum infrastructure equipment, costing on average $16 million. MMDS customer equipment is also very expensive, with the cost of deployment for a single customer running in the range of $1,000.
Wi-Fi, or 802.11b is a much lower speed technology; achieving throughputs of up to 5.5 Mbps full duplex. Wi-Fi bandwidth decreases significantly with distance between components, and is particularly dependent on obstructions such as roofs or walls, as well as interference from other networks or even microwave ovens.
Another type of wireless network uses light, in the form of, for example, lasers or light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to transmit high-speed data in a process called free space optic systems, or FSO systems. While FSO systems are a cost-effective high-speed communications medium, they require very highly aligned line-of-sight paths. More specifically, existing free space optic systems have very narrow beam divergence parameters requiring precision alignment. For this reason, laser and FSO components tend to be expensive and require high levels of maintenance and service.
There thus exists demand for high-speed, affordable Internet connections in geographies and neighborhoods into which more traditional, wired high-speed network infrastructure cannot be cost-effectively extended. This demand will grow significantly as the Internet is increasingly used to deliver content, facilitate business transactions and support other matters amenable to electronic data transfer.